Critic's Corner
CONCERT REVIEW
Dinosaur Jr., Music Hall of Williamsburg
December 7th was the second-to-last show of Dinosaur Jr.’s eight-night “residency” at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, New York. Amid all the Starbucks and pricey jeans stores, the grungy venue with its marquee claiming “DINOSAUR JR. SOLD OUT,” along with a substantial line of people sporting black T-shirts, provided a stark reminder that Williamsburg was once cool. After listening to 40 minutes of slow electronic folk, stoic guitar hero J. Mascis and his giant Muppet-like counterpart, fun, hip bassist Lou Barlow, came onstage to celebrate 30 years of their album Where You Been.
In preparation for the show, I listened to the album a bunch of times and decided that it was a really good album, just not Dino’s best, which would be their …
Crime Blotter: Ivy League Edition
The presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT, whose names are — or hopefully by the time of this publication, were — Claudine Gay, Elizabeth Magill, and Sally Kornbluth, respectively, testified before Congress that mobs of masked students and professors calling for the genocide of Jews “from the river to the sea” is definitely not a form of harassment or even a microaggression but rather a form of free speech that all Americans should be proud of. Presidents Hear No Evil, See No Evil, and Speak No Evil further testified that refusing admission to high-scoring Asian students is in no way a form of race-based discrimination; hiring professors and administrators on the basis of their race and political viewpoints is in no way discriminatory; raping people with disfavored national identities or political leanings is not rape; silencing …
Death of a Ladies’ Man
Locked in a recording studio by a violent psychotic
Listening to your woman make love to another man in the next room
How Leonard Cohen’s Doo-Wop Nightmare was Born
I’m no Canada apologist. I once moved there for a spell, inspired by my latest crack-up — Vancouver, more exactly, where I lived with my toothless, jobless lover in the vacated studio apartment of a newly canceled member of the record industry. I made no friends, spent my days walking around. At one point, I attempted to sublet a different apartment from a woman whose only furniture was an exercise ball and who invited me to a “cuddle party,” which is exactly as it sounds. “It’s really all about consent,” she said in a baby voice. Oh, brother.
When Leonard Cohen died, I was halfway through my sentence there. I liked his music well enough, but a self-styled Canadian poet was a hard pill for me to swallow. Get real: It’s a world of truck drivers. That’s Canada, only they’re too ashamed to admit it, much less embrace it. Know what I mean?
A friend sent me a song from the album Death of a Ladies’ …
